Sooloos music server: Anyone hear, anyone a dealer

One doesn't need to necessarily hear a digital playback system in order to tell (ball-park assessment) the quality level. It suffices to look at some of the data that is published. Of course, the data only has this correlation to sound quality once one has heard many, many other devices or tweaks of devices and has a grasp for the correlation between lowered Jitter and sound quality.

So, hearing that there is less than 1 Nanosecond of jitter (that is tons and tons -- and that's why people are saying that transports are better in sound quality (see another thread here) and then that you have to slave a DAC to this Master Digital source for "best sound quality" is simply naive. It is not anywhere near best sound quality and I take issue with such a formulation. It is actually worse in a Jitter sense. It is only better in the DAC schematic sense, so there is a trade-off and to use the term "better quality" is, for me, another way of saying "more gear, different sound, somewhat better, but by far not as good as it could be".

I'm trying to think of a proper analogy to clarify my point. I guess it it would be like going up to a 55 year old established concert pianist and, straight to his face, say: "I have this excellent sounding Steinway. It doesn't have a soundboard, though, and the body is made out of cardboard, but it achieves the best possible sound quality nonetheless." The pianist would look at you and walk away, without even playing the piano.

There are some things which need not be heard in order to be understood right off the bat.

I am up against common Jitter marketing which is quickly taking over the minds of many audiophiles. It may sound improbable when someone says they can tell "how a unit sounds" without having heard it. I don't know how it sounds, but I know what that kind of Jitter sounds like. Sounds like computer audio.

Liudas

So from a theoretical perspective, how would you fix this? Is a clock link absolutly necessary, as to make the D/A the master and the Sooloos unit the slave? How easy (hard?), is something like this to fix/modify? Can it even be done?

BTW, you have some good looking gear, I wish the US dollar was a little stronger.

When I was in the Sooloos room I overheard a conversation between two people, one was totally buzzed by the looks, convenience and "modern" approach of the Sooloos system.

I was speaking with another gentleman and commented that the price seemed way out of line for the performance level it provided. I suggested an Apple iMac and rack of outboard HD's and wait a year or two for touch screens to appear at Micro Center or Best Buy.

He agreed and said that was exactly what he had purchased for his own home.

The guy that was buzzed about the Sooloos looked shocked and walked away. I found out that he had recently purchased one from a dealer and waiting for delivery.

I felt bad, it was not my intention to rain on his parade but at least two of us in the room were thinking the same thing and the guy I was discussing this with was part of the demo.

Yetis, when dealing with computer audio, it might be more difficult (or impossible) to simply slave the machine to a DAC with master clock. The reason is that the Master Clock needs to give the frequency for the data to follow, and computer audio is often associated with many different sampling rates. I won't get too technical here, but the answer is that the clock link is not absolutely necessary at all, only if you are in it for the quality. But if you really wanted quality, you'd think twice about including PLL's to derive the sampling rates, which is what computer audio does, since a separate clock would otherwise be needed for every sampling rate, and that costs money to build. I am speaking from an engineering perspective here. From a user perspective, I would not get into it, because you have to drill holes in the sooloos and experiment and it may or may not work, something might break, and then sooloos will not give you any money for trying to raise the quality of their device.

All this wonderful user interface make-up is nice stuff. But still it make you feel you are on Amazon looking for a CD.

Just to follow up...I did get to hear a Sooloos running a rather high end system at THE Show (sorry, I can't remember the name of the gear) play some familiar material and the sound quality was easily as good as what you would get from a normal coax digital out on a better than average sound card like an M-Audio or higher into a good D/A.

I agree that listing the jitter at less than 1 nanosecond is as silly as listing my height as less than 100 feet, but from what I heard, it is in a respectable range which is obviously less than 1 nanosecond.

And while I also agree that the unit is very expensive, I cannot imagine a better GUI or touch screen. Nothing I have ever seen comes close. The best off the shelf (now free) software I know of is J. River, and it's nowhere near as nice as this. The Sooloos GUI fills nearly the entire screen with your album artwork sorted by Artist, Genre, or whatever, and makes you feel like you are flipping through your actual CD or LP collection. To me it is the antithesis of "Amazon" or the typical cluttered text-based GUI. Their touch panel is also the first I have experienced to not seem to show any fingerprints even though hundreds, if not thousands, of people had touched the screen with their greasy fingers. And the response time was instantaneous. I guess these things are all in the eye of the beholder.

Yes, very expensive though.